the loyalty of uzuki yuugao
by terafonne
Summary: The will of fire does not blaze. This is the tribute Gekkou Hayate deserved. Very slight au. /Yuugao fights side-by-side with his killer./


A/N: the change of tenses is intentional.

Uzuki Yuugao has known what she wanted to be since forever and a half, since she stayed quiet and observant and ran things through in her mind and stayed in the academy because this isn't learning, she's realized, this is making the connections you will need to advance this building teams years before they make chuunin, which two-thirds will be lucky to do, especially in wartime when the regular shinobi corps are kunai fodder and they know it (mostly, anyways).

She takes the time to be careful and calculate each test each examination each unofficial assessment (she briefly considers holding back but the ones scouring the Academy for recruits are jounin and she's only a war-accelerated Academy soon-to-be graduate) to be perfectly and neatly bland, just another average genin, too average by far. She takes pride in being known and unknown to nearly all members of the class, even with her unique hair color. She plays her cards right apparently, because she gets pulled out of class for ANBU and after a year of training she's given a mask and runs barrier patrols across the village for the next six months (it's not much but it relieves stronger and better fighters).

She then spends the next year and a half running intermittent high-risk messages with various teams while apprenticed to a tokubetsu jounin for kenjutsu and some visibility in the village. After mastering the art of the sword to some degree (because honestly the only other thing she'd be good at is infiltration, possibly seduction, but those divisions receive such ridiculously long missions she doesn't truly have the mentality for), she's honored to be selected as part of Team Ro, with such infamous prodigies as Hatake Kakashi, Uchiha Itachi and the Mokuton user known as Tenzou.

They fight and bleed and patch each other up and bring each other home.

Karasu has not been promoted to a team of his own for a year when the Massacre happens. They're the first on site, because Ro had a mission briefing. They received a slightly different one: of cleaning and removing the dead Uchiha.

They keep going. One clan does not a village make.

And as she keeps training with Hayate-sensei, who honestly was barely four years older than her, taking missions every three months to cement her official "kenjutsu apprentice" cover, she learns what intimacy means, for one person to have your back and you theirs, to predict each other's movements, keeping watch for each other.

They fall towards each other almost as soon as she achieves her mastery. Peacetime is only peaceful for the genin corps and civilians. Even normal, non-specialized chuunin felt the pressure. More missions only aggravated his sickness. He restrained himself to a paperwork position and she resolved to track down Senju Tsunade after the Chuunin Exams.

She honed in on his chakra halfway across the village and screamed soundlessly.

His killer was Sand-nin, the backstabbing little desert bug led blindly by the student of the honorable Sandaime Hokage, kami bless his soul if it weren't eaten by Shinigami (not. she hold her own suspicions of the night of the massacre but they are shinobi and loyalty and lack of a death wish keeps her mouth shut).

His killer is Sand-nin, the now prospering village whose Kage is the best friend of Konoha's own jinchuuriki. She keeps her mouth shut and trains herself to wield his sword and hers. Gekkou Hayate keeps protecting the village.

She's the leader of her own team now. She could retire. That is never an option. There are other shinobi who died in the attack, but to Sound-nin. Somewhere between the chaos of instituting a new Hokage and a single battle war, his name does not make it on the Memorial Stone. It's alright, she knows where his body lies. (and in all likelihood neither will hers)

Her single most precious person is buried on a hill where the wind breathes soft, unlike the blades that killed him.

Yuugao fights side-by-side with his killer to defeat the strongest shinobi ever born. When they win, not if, she will return to the village with her team. She will run missions for her new Hokage. The first sacrifice in futile attack by a future ally remains dead and gone. She wears her mask and kills his revived corpse quickly and efficiently. She refuses herself that closure.

There is a hill where the wind breathes soft and lifts her hair around her shoulders when her head is down.


End file.
